Part 3: On-Demand Lucid Dreaming—The Roadmap to Mainstream
This is Part 3 of a three part series:
* Part 1: Waking Up to Lucid Dreams
* Part 2: On-Demand Lucid Dreaming — The Current State
* Part 3: On-Demand Lucid Dreaming — The Roadmap to Mainstream
Lucid dreaming will go mainstream within our lifetime. In Part 2 of this series, we explored the current methods used for lucid dream induction: from cognitive techniques to external supplements to external stimuli. For lucid dreaming to go mainstream, it must be available on-demand.
In this series, we’re defining on-demand lucid dreaming as using a simple solution to achieve a lucid dream in more than 50% of nights without any prior training. When this goal is met, a new portal is open to the masses. This life-changing lucid dreaming capability instantly moves beyond monks, the few with natural talents, and dedicated enthusiasts — it expands to everyone that wants to explore their own mind and potentially a broader consciousness. We will expand the circle to more science-minded individuals that are needed to move the field forward.
Many books and workshops are available to learn cognitive techniques to increase lucid dream frequency and duration. These techniques — like dream journaling and daytime reality checks — help build a strong foundation in lucid dreaming. But these techniques are difficult to build into sustainable habits to reliably induce lucid dreams. Cognitive techniques alone are not enough to spark on-demand lucid dreaming and mass adoption.
Someday, a supplement blend may prove highly effective to induce lucid dreaming. Imagine a personalized supplement blend — tailored to trigger lucidity — that takes into account the user’s unique baseline neurochemistry. Given the person-to-person variance, this reality is likely further into the future. And flooding one’s system with systemic biochemical changes to induce awareness in dreams may disrupt sleep and negatively impact health.
Using a device to apply targeted bursts of external stimuli to the user’s brain at precise moments during REM sleep seems like the most viable path forward for on-demand lucid dreaming. The field of non-invasive brain stimulation is young, but advancing rapidly.
Believing in the future viability of external stimuli for inducing lucid dreams is currently a leap of faith. As detailed in Part 2 of this series, past attempts have fallen short. Fortunately, technology continues to progress at a crazy pace. Past progress compounds to create exponential advances. Sensors will continue to improve and miniaturize. Techniques for algorithm development will get easier through friendlier user interfaces and tools. Our understanding of the brain can only improve. With the accelerating pace of technological advancement, it seems inevitable that future technology will eventually be up to the task of reliably inducing lucid dreams. When this day comes, the floodgates will open to the world of lucid dreaming.
On-demand lucid dreaming product requirements
To unlock on-demand lucid dreaming, we must deliver on the user story: “As an average person that has no training in lucid dreaming, I want to achieve high-quality lucid dreams more than 50% of the nights that I use a simple solution — without negative side effects — so that I can better explore my mind and consciousness in dreams.”
To spark on-demand lucid dreaming and widespread use, a device must possess the right blend of effectiveness, safety, ease of use, and user value. Below is a vision for such a device.
Effective
The device must work more than 50% of nights — even for those that don’t practice cognitive techniques for lucid dreaming. To achieve this, we must send an effective dose of stimulation to the right place at the right time.
Dose: The type of electrical stimulation (e.g. tACS, tDCS, TMS, etc.), strength, and frequency (e.g. 40Hz) must induce meaningful changes to a person’s awareness and memory to reliably jolt them into a lucid dream without waking them. It may need to be personalized to the individual user based on their unique baseline.
Targeted: It must focus this stimulation dose to an effective location. Given our lack of knowledge in the domain of neuromodulation, this will take some trial and error.
Timed: Dose should be targeted to REM sleep periods in the later sleep cycles to maximize the chance of lucidity.
Achieving an effective, targeted dose is likely the biggest barrier to on-demand lucid dreaming. It’ll be difficult and essential.
Safe
Any device should do no harm to the user’s brain or significantly disrupt their sleep. Sleep has an enormous impact on our health and emotional wellbeing. Evolution has optimized our sleep physiology over many iterations. Frequent lucid dreams may reduce the restorative effects of natural sleep and dreams. However, using technology to improve our deep sleep and to make our dreams more vivid may jumpstart the next evolutionary leap of our sleep experience.
Controlled studies should be conducted to demonstrate safety. This will eliminate a purchase barrier for many.
User-friendly
It must be simple to use and comfortable to wear.
Non-invasive: The device should apply stimulation through the skin without the need for implants.
Comfortable: It must be comfortable to wear and not interfere with sleep. Given the likely need for the device to touch the forehead, this will be a design challenge. It will never be as comfortable as a wearable device like the Oura Ring, but recent headband designs like the Dreem 2 and Philips Deep Sleep Headband have both aligned on a thin, soft, lightweight headband design that does not cover the ears. This may follow a similar design path as the smartphone product category in which multiple companies eventually aligned on similar form factors and then made incremental improvements with each subsequent product generation.
Simple: It must require minimal effort to get started on the first night of use.
Device placement must be intuitive and require minimal effort to sense and stimulate the correct locations.
The stimulation must be achieved without the use of adhesives or patches. Using adhesives or patches increases the amount of effort needed to use the device each night and makes it feel too much like a medical user experience.
REM sleep detection must happen in real-time, using on-device processing. It must not require continual connectivity to the user’s mobile device. This eliminates the impact of potential connectivity issues. Other sleep stages can be calculated through retrospective sleep analysis either on the device or on the corresponding mobile app.
Battery life must last for an entire night. 12 hours of battery life will suffice. The charger could be designed as a bedside stand to store and charge the device.
Valuable
The price should seem like a bargain to the user given the benefits. Beyond achieving a lucid dream on more than 50% of nights, value can be created with other features:
Sleep monitoring: Sensors will be required to detect when a person is in REM sleep, so we might as well use these sensors to monitor sleep the entire night, including detection of the broad sleep stages (Deep, REM, Light, Awake), sleep efficiency, sleep onset latency, and trends of other metrics correlated to sleep quality, such as: heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen levels, respiratory rate, and breathing disturbances. Sensors to generate these metrics may include EEG dry electrodes, LEDs for PPG optical sensing across a range of wavelengths, temperature sensors, and an accelerometer.
Dream monitoring: Use the sensor data to automatically decode and record the imagery and events experienced within dreams. While it may seem like science fiction, researchers are progressing on this functionality.
Improve sleep quality: Ideally, the stimulation modality will enable functionality to also help the user fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and increase the quality of their restful deep sleep. This functionality is currently being pioneered with acoustics and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).
Lucid Dream Coaching: Users should receive education and personalized guidance to help them increase their lucid dream frequency and duration. This could start as simple as a dream journal feature in the app. It could also include mindfulness exercises to boost metacognition skills, provide daytime reminders for the user to question if they are in a dream (i.e. reality checks), or to gently wake the user after the first few sleep cycles so they can engage in middle-of-the-night guided practices (e.g. WBTB, MILD, etc.) to increase the likelihood of lucid dreams in later sleep cycles.
Sleep Coaching: Users should receive education on how to improve their sleep quality. Ambient sensors within the charger could sense environmental factors — such as light, temperature, humidity, and noise — so users can better optimize their sleep environment. With accurate sleep monitoring, the user can see what sleep improvement techniques have the greatest impact on their sleep quality.
Community: It should be easy for users to connect with each other to share tips and experiences. This could include the sharing of lucid dreaming tips, the sharing of sleep quality tips, or even participant-led research experiments into topics like mutual dreaming.
Even including a subset of these additional features will deepen the mainstream appeal of the device, and make it seem like a bargain even at high price points. Some users might even buy the device for the features unrelated to lucid dreaming, and later discover lucid dreaming as an unexpected desire. These features are the Trojan Horse filled with soldiers ready to induce lucid dreams for the masses.
All of this functionality won’t happen overnight. But when it’s all within one effective, safe, user-friendly, valuable device — lucid dreaming will go mainstream.
Frontiers of Exploration
When lucid dreaming is available on demand, it will open the frontier to more explorers than ever. What can we explore, together? Options are vast and likely include ideas we can’t yet conceptualize.
Given the uncharted territory, we should keep a radically open mind. In my experience, lucid dreams often respond to the pre-existing beliefs we carry with us in waking life. We are not constrained by normal physics or cultural constructs in our lucid dreams. If you believe you can fly through a wall, you can fly through a wall. Our thoughts mold the environment and interactions. Imagination is our primary constraint. If we go beyond the imaginary fence of our pre-existing beliefs, what we find may change the course of human history.
We may unlock new frontiers in medical research. In the dream state, our mental machinery is more accessible, so we may gain greater control over the mind-body connection responsible for the positive benefits of the placebo effect. There have even been anecdotal claims of healing occuring during lucid dreams that warrant further scientific study.
Psychology research can be advanced by studying this hybrid mental state blending aspects of waking and dreaming consciousness. If we can better view our minds from the inside, we may gain new perspectives on how our minds work, what creates our personalities, and what influences our daytime actions.
Lucid dreaming may also find useful applications in mental health, such as helping people cope with nightmares or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). By taking control of nightmares, the dreamer can transform a dream from a stressful experience to a delightful experience. It’s more fun to go surfing with a scary monster in a lucid dream than to fight it to the death in a nightmare. And in more serious situations like PTSD, traumatic experiences can be re-lived within a lucid dream from a place of control. The lucid dreamer can potentially reshape the traumatic memory and reprogram their response to trauma triggers in the future.
Lucid dreaming may also provide a portal of exploration into consciousness research. What even is consciousness? Do we exist beyond our physical bodies? Can we communicate nonlocally with a broader consciousness? There are more questions than answers in this field, leaving fertile grounds for exploration. Some speculate our consciousness can travel to distinct planes of existence while we dream. If some lucid dreams are actually out-of-body experiences, and if we have parallel lives on the astral plane, it changes our fundamental understanding of the nature of reality.
If true, lucid dreaming could expand our explorations across time and space. If our consciousness must not conform to the conventional wisdom of physics, it may be possible to travel through time and space. The nostalgic could revisit the past, while the forward-looking could visit the future. Even in the present, it might be possible to access precognition of what’s to come or to travel to galaxies far far away. Or maybe we can travel to other planes of existence in a quantum realm we struggle to measure or conceptualize. We could explore whether spirits actually exist and attempt to travel where we can more directly communicate with them.
Conclusion
Open-minded, scientific-minded adventurers will blaze the path forward toward on-demand lucid dreaming. Carl Sagan wrote about the need to mix openness and skepticism to advance science a year before he died, and this concept rings true as we expand our explorations into lucid dreaming:
“Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea, and hypothesis — which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism — especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested — and you’re not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science. A judicious mix is what we need.” — Carl Sagan
I plan to explore all of these topics with an open, skeptical mind in the upcoming decades.
Sure — some of these topics are downright strange in our current culture. I hesitate to write about them, fearing judgement from peers. But this strangeness is precisely why lucid dreaming is a meaningful area of exploration. Strange is unfamiliar. It’s the domain of discovery.
There’s more to explore and discover than we know. It feels like an important secret unappreciated by most. Like the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s, lucid dreaming communities will today plant the seeds that bear fruit in the upcoming decades. That’s why I started Tech for Dreaming.
Lucid dreaming may provide scientific evidence of existence beyond our physical bodies and life after death. I literally can’t think of anything more exciting. It keeps me awake at night.
By waking up to our dreams, we may wake up to our true reality. Let’s explore this boundless frontier, together.
